University Diaries has chronicled scads of professors and students caught on security camera stealing, taping harassment notes to themselves on their doors, scrawling swastikas on their doors… The most spectacular case of this was Pomona professor Kerri Dunn (http://articles.latimes.com/2004/aug/19/local/me-dunn19), although in that case it wasn’t a security camera. A bunch of guys saw her spray painting her car with racist slogans.

Only a few days ago I wrote about the occupational therapy professor filmed returning some amazing products he’d gifted himself out of his university’s endowment (http://www.margaretsoltan.com/?p=36404). He’d been tipped off that university officials suspected him of theft.

Now there’s this:

http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-new-britain-ccsu-bias-made-it-up-0703-20120702,0,4275448.story

This variety of campus story has become, over the years I’ve written this blog, incredibly common. A student reports a hate crime against herself. Once again security cameras film her staging it.

It seems to be about drawing attention to oneself – like Dunn, you get to address big rallies of students and faculty outraged on your behalf.

Sometimes, as allegedly in the Madonna Constantine case

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_Constantine

people do hate stuff to themselves in order to deflect attention from other problems they’re having.

But this is usually about pathetic love-me motives.

… but it’s pretty clear that there are at least two groups of clever people out there actively checking your letters and numbers, your words and your music, your alpha and omega. So don’t be paranoid, but look sharp.

There are all those Germans with their plagiarism-detection websites… They’ve taken down a defense minister and many other high-ranking people and they’re definitely still at it.

And then there are statisticians like Uri Simonsohn. Uri’s a young Wharton professor who checks out your numbers and on finding them bogus destroys your career.

That may sound harsh, but do we really want social psychologists feeding us all sorts of bullshit all the time and gaining fancy professorships thereby? I don’t think people should be rewarded for taking advantage of our propensity to believe anything.

How could the guy who discovered gems like this now be accused of research fraud????

… because school administrators with fake degrees usually look for jobs in nowheresville sorts of places, and Wasser managed to become (until he was found out) superintendent of a large New Jersey school district. Doc Pendley, who came to the wee Columbia California school district burnishing a LaSalle University degree (the LaSalle scam operated out of Louisiana before its operator went to prison), is far more typical.

Pendley’s bullshit degree is only the beginning of Columbia’s problems.

Pendley and the Board of Trustees have faced criticism within the past several months for their handling of a May 2010 criminal incident involving Pendley’s 24-year-old son, Brennan, who worked as an after-school aide at Columbia Elementary.

Brennan pleaded guilty in June of last year to having sex with a minor, then an eighth-grader, in a classroom.

Since then, comment at district board meetings has centered on John Pendley’s hiring of his unqualified son for the job…

… designed to rope naive people in to taking over-priced courses at lousy schools. If you like the idea of subsidizing for-profit colleges as they engage in their scandalous recruiting practices, read no further.

The rest of us should find it pretty heartening that a bill just introduced in Congress “would prohibit colleges of all kinds from using dollars from federal student assistance programs, including the GI Bill, to pay for advertising and recruiting.”

A sponsor of the bill, Tom Harkin, “emphasized the proposal would leave schools free to advertise — just from a separate pot of money that hasn’t come from taxpayers.”

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And, you know, we’ve been lectured endlessly by the for-profits about letting markets work… So I guess they’re okay with this? Free market, that’s what they’re about, not like the wimpy non-profits! One look at for-profit management compensation will tell you the free market’s working just fine for them. The prez of Harvard makes like, what, around a million dollars. It’s typical for heads of for-profit colleges to make ten million or more. Some of them make much more.

But no – they’re pissed about the legislation! Not only should practically all of their revenue come from the government (not much of a free market model when you think about it, huh?), but they should be free to do fuck-all with our money.

A New York Times article notes the alarmingly high rate of retractions for articles in scientific journals.

… [The] scramble to publish in high-impact journals may be leading to more and more errors. Each year, every laboratory produces a new crop of Ph.D.’s, who must compete for a small number of jobs, and the competition is getting fiercer. In 1973, more than half of biologists had a tenure-track job within six years of getting a Ph.D. By 2006 the figure was down to 15 percent

Greg Mortenson, already in trouble for having apparently made up parts of his best-selling books about establishing schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, must now repay his charity a million dollars — money he is said to have used for personal expenses.

… since scientists pointed out the fraudulence of Yoshitaka Fujii’s work? A decade during which scads of his bogus articles about anesthesia appeared in all the major journals in the field?

180 of his articles are currently under investigation for faked data. 180! And all the time people were trying to get someone – anyone – to pay attention.

[One of the whistle blowers] wrote to the FDA, its Japanese counterpart and the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists to warn them about Dr. Fujii’s results — but received either no reply or a cursory acknowledgment of his concerns.

Scott Reuben, Joachim Boldt, Fujii – what is it about anesthesiologists? Are they in a permanent state of twilight sleep?

… to some extent at most American medical schools, UD says they should turn their attention to corporate ghostwriting of articles and books for university researchers.

AMSA’s simple expediency of publishing COI rankings for each school has shamed many institutions into taking more seriously not merely specific practices like free drug samples and the constant trolling of campus by pharma sales people, but also disclosure in general, as in how much pharma money this or that professor pockets.

The widespread scandal involving professors claiming publications in the scientific literature which have in fact been written, in whole or in part, by ghostwriting firms paid by pharmaceutical companies, is much talked about. But professional organizations and editorial boards – both almost completely dependent on revenue from drug firms – will never do anything about it. Universities don’t care. Only independent groups like AMSA can get anywhere on this one.

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We can expect resistance to all of these changes. UD anticipates a new organization emerging called PharmFee.

K-12 and university online for-profit education – always an incredibly trashy business model – is collapsing left and right as people and states begin to realize that their education taxes are going to the schools’ CEOs and advertising budgets, while the dupes the schools talk into enrolling are dropping out (“these [K-12] cyber schools might as well have a turnstile as their logo for the volume of withdrawals they experience”). Cyber university students get the added benefit of dropping out burdened with huge loan repayments.

Kaplan’s closing a Florida campus “that opened to great fanfare two years ago, but quickly lost students after a federal investigation raised questions about its admissions practices.”

Boohoo! But see that’s the business model there – you take in anyone with a pulse and syphon off all the tax dollars they come with and then … fuck them! You got their money. They can twist slowly in the wind.

You want to understand this business model? Read Glengarry Glen Ross.

Now investors are pissed because word’s out about the utterly shitty education on offer and how all the students are dropping out and all.

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But why are people so obtuse when it comes to understanding how markets work? You set up a tax-syphoning enterprise. You take most of the money that pours in for yourself and your investors, and you set aside some dollars for blitz advertising (you need a steady flow of money-bodies). Oh, and you devote a bit to greasing the hands of politicians.

With the seventy five cents or so left over you hire a teacher to handle hundreds of students per class… Maybe some faceless unqualified drudge in India… Much cheaper to outsource…

Oh, but here come headlines like EDUCATION ON THE CHEAP and articles predicting that “these companies probably won’t have much luck if they continue to offer shoddy educations while raking in profits.”

So now you’re kind of tinkering with the business model. Your basic philosophy – take the money and run – hasn’t altered, but there are many things you can do around the edges to look respectable enough to continue to attract investors and student dupes.

UD has confidence in you. This is only a temporary setback.

A special report on Duke University’s enthusiasm for Anil Potti.

… bask in it.

Who wins? Nice plot twist: The professor!

For six years, Claremont McKenna’s dean of admissions added ten to twenty extra points to the school’s SAT scores. He has resigned.

… the research fraud beat goes on. Diederik Stapel and Dipak Das share a protocol: Just make the shit up.